While I’ve occasionally squirmed at the incongruence — hypocrisy, perhaps — of my secular feminism and Orthodox Judaism, it wasn’t until the JOFA conference that I really paid it more than a passing thought.

Once again, a mass shooting tragedy has captured the nation’s attention. Once again, the question everyone wants answered is: Why? What drove Aaron Alexis to do something so awful, so incomprehensible, and seemingly so senseless? We all want to know why he did it because we want to know if there’s something we could have done to see it coming — something we can do to prevent it from happening again.